Every so often, writers at The Republic criticize one another’s articles. I want to address what I believe are some serious mistakes Travis Dodds made in his piece, Brittney Spears and the Future of Young Families (issue 174).

Dodds takes aim at social work, and I share many of his concerns. Although I don’t speak on behalf of any human services organization, I do have a Masters degree in Social Work with a Social Services Management specialization.

During my university education I was dismayed by how politically vacuous so many of my fellow students appeared to be. By and large, they lacked what C Wright Mills called a “sociological imagination,” or the ability to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. They didn’t want to examine the way that bureaucratic corruption, class conflict, systemic racism, and colonialism have shaped social work institutions, and they were reluctant to examine their own proclivity for authoritarianism and ideological rigidity, a proclivity that can be aggravated by the counter-transference and vicarious trauma that social workers deal with on a daily basis.

Fortunately, many schools of social work, such as the University of Victoria’s program, have embraced the anti-oppressive model of social work practice, a model that enriches the sociological imagination, encourages students to examine their own complicity in social injustices, and to challenge those injustices in the field. Even so, social workers and the agencies they work for remain torn between their roles as agents of social empowerment and agents of social control. Social work remains ethically ambiguous and its influence is rarely 100% benign. I strongly support the work of social work watchdog organizations like the Pivot Legal Society, and I hope their influence grows.

Social work agencies need to be held accountable by the public and the media, but criticisms launched against them need to be strategic and sound. Without these virtues, criticisms lack credibility, and without credibility they’re politically impotent. With this in mind, let’s examine Dodds’ article.

Dodds claims that there is “an epidemic of social workers swooping on families like rabid storks.” This depends on how we define an “epidemic.”

The Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia and the Office of the Provincial Health Officer produced a report in 2006 entitled A Review of the Mortality Experience of Children and Youth in Care, 1986 to 2005, British Columbia. This report states that the proportion of children and youth in care as a percentage of the provincial child population stood at 0.86% in 1986. By 1993 it was down to 0.67%. It increased to 1.08% by 2001. By 2005 it was back down to about 1.00%. Does 1% constitute an “epidemic”?

Dodds writes that “large numbers of children die in the care of the government.” Compared with children in the general population, those in Ministry care are 4.2 times as likely to die of natural causes and 3.1 times as likely to die of external causes. Congenital abnormalities are by far the leading cause of death. The government argues these statistics show that when it comes to their health, the children the Ministry serves are a high-risk population. Dodds believes that this position “doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

To put these figures in perspective, compare the number of children who die in the Ministry’s care to the number who die in the care of families receiving services from the Ministry. If the children served by the Ministry actually are a high-risk population, then we should see a high child mortality rate among children who aren’t in the care of the Ministry but who are nonetheless involved with the Ministry in some capacity.

The Ministry’s website tells us that 145 children died in the Ministry’s care between 1996 and 2006. Eighty-one died from natural causes, 29 from accidents, 4 from homicide, 15 from suicide, and 16 from undetermined causes. During this same period, 833 children who weren’t in care but who received some services from the Ministry also died. Five hundred and twenty-nine died from natural causes, 161 from accidents, 36 from homicide, 47 from suicide, and 60 from undetermined causes. The fact that during this time 5.7 times more Ministry-involved children died than did children in care strongly suggests that this population is indeed high-risk.

Let’s move on from child mortality to the rate of child maltreatment in Canadian foster homes. It’s true that foster care should only be a last resort. Whenever children are removed from their parents they risk attachment disruption, especially if they’re moved through multiple foster homes or if they undergo a cycle of removal, return to the parents, and further removal. This disruption can be psychologically ruinous, and qualifies as a form of systemic child abuse. Social workers have a responsibility to try and prevent it.

As for non-systemic child maltreatment in foster care, the best data that I have found on this subject comes from a 2001 report by Canada’s Ministry of Health entitled Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect. This report deconstructs child protection data from across Canada for 1998. In that year there were 135,573 investigations of abuse and neglect. Child maltreatment was confirmed in 45% of these cases, suspected in 22%, and unsubstantiated in 33%. Only 8% of investigations resulted in children being placed in the care of child welfare authorities.

Foster parents and adoptive parents were the alleged perpetrators in 1,083 of these investigations, or in approximately 1% of the total number of investigations. This may sound like an unusually small figure, but remember that in British Columbia the percentage of children in care between 1986 and 2005 has ranged between 0.67% and 1.08%. If the percentage of children in care is relatively constant across Canada, then this would mean that foster and adoptive parents are being investigated for child maltreatment at about the same rate as other caregivers. The investigations concluded that the allegations against foster and adoptive parents were unsubstantiated 67% of the time.

Dodds writes that “the number of cases of sexual abuse in foster care is proportionate to the number of deaths in government care. Some estimates indicate more than half the children in foster care fall prey to sexual abuse.” I don’t know where Dodds gets this figure from. The worst estimates I’ve seen come out of Arizona, where a class action lawsuit alleged that 12.5 percent of the state’s foster care population had been sexually abused while in care (Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, Bogutz v. Arizona, 2nd amended civil complaint, No. CV94-04159, July 1994). Even if these allegations are true, they can’t be generalized beyond Arizona, as American child welfare systems differ radically from Canadian systems.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that 50% of the children in care are being sexually abused, and that this is proportionate to child mortality in care. Since there are more than 900,000 children in BC, and since about 1% of them are in the Ministry’s care in any given year, we should be seeing an annual provincial death rate among children in care of about 4,500, rather than the average rate of 14 per year that we’ve actually seen for the last two decades.

But is it true that 50% of children in care are being sexually abused in their foster homes? Let’s ignore sexual abuse among foster siblings and focus specifically on sexually abusive foster parents. Out of the 14,406 Canadian investigations of sexual abuse allegations in 1998, 546 of the alleged perpetrators, or 4% of the total, were foster parents and adoptive parents. These allegations were found to be substantiated in 6% of the cases, suspected in 2%, and unsubstantiated in 92%. That means that for the entire country in 1998 there were only about 33 substantiated cases of sexual abuse by foster and adoptive parents.

Of course, it’s altogether possible that the actual rate of sexual abuse in foster care is higher than these figures suggest. Many incidents of sexual abuse by foster parents may well go unreported. However, this caveat cuts both ways: it’s likely that a lot of sexual abuse by regular parents also goes unreported.

Finally, Dodds says that the Ministry keeps parents in the dark about the reasons for its involvement in their lives. Dodds writes that “MCFD cases are exempt from the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act.” This isn’t accurate. Ministry clients and former clients can obtain copies of their files through this act. The copies they receive are edited to remove third party information, but are otherwise complete. He also writes that parents are “forced to defend themselves against accusations without even knowing what the accusations are.” This, too, is inaccurate. Whenever social workers decide to remove a child or apply for an order concerning a child they must go to court and file documents outlining the reasons for their decisions. If the judge doesn’t believe that these reasons are sufficient, the child may be returned or the order denied. Parents and their legal counsel receive copies of these documents, and they can contest the Ministry’s applications, sending the matter to trial. If this occurs, their legal counsel will apply for a full disclosure of the family’s files, edited, once again, only to remove third party information.

It’s important to remember that there are some protocols in place to hold social workers and foster parents accountable. If parents believe they’re being treated unfairly, they can contact their social worker’s supervisor or lodge a complaint with quality assurance. If they believe their children are being mistreated in foster care, and that their social worker isn’t taking their concerns seriously, they can contact BC’s Child and Youth Officer.

The tacit premise underlying Dodds’ article is that the state has no right to interfere in the lives of families. Dodds doesn’t acknowledge that this widespread position originated in the historic belief that children are their parents’ property, in the same way that women were once considered their husbands’ property. Child welfare services are predicated on the position that children aren’t anyone’s property, and that they both need and deserve the protection of their community. As dysfunctional and oppressive as child welfare institutions can be, their philosophical foundation is genuinely progressive, and I hope Dodds reconsiders his position on them.